Yet the persisting fact of the cats gnawed at me; at night I would wake up, with my mother’s ghost wavering in the room, over where Evelyn had dropped her white bathrobe on the back of a chair, and want to scream, in shame and helplessness. The runny-eyed kittens, staggering with hunger. Why had they been called into life? My mother, with more courage than I had, used to drown them, pressing one bucket down into another bucket half filled with water and their peeping cries. My mother’s humming returned to me, marking waltz time with the handle’s rhythmic chunking noise, and with it came the whole sweet-and-sour aroma of the kitchen, the way she had shaped it with her life, all those mornings of rising alone, making coffee and pouring cereal, and ceremoniously feeding the cats, while the mantel clock sounded its gulping gong. Thriftily, she would squeeze slivers of used soap together, to make a motley bar which sat in the bathroom dish like a rebuke to her only, stingy son.

One morning, before I was really awake, Amy, taking pity, called me. “Well, he’s been busy,” she told me. “He must have brought two or three in every evening now for nearly two weeks. But, as he says, the others get more and more wary, so it may be a case of diminishing returns.”

“Still, that’s terrific progress. I’m very grateful. At that rate there can’t be too many left.”

“That’s right,” she said, “and the young ones you can count on dying of natural causes, especially now that we’re having frosts.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that I was grateful for that, too.

At the beginning of hunting season, Dwight called and told me he and Adam had posted my land. Did I mind? He knew, of course, that one of my mother’s eccentricities was to leave her land unposted, to the annoyance of her neighbors. “They just want the shooting for themselves,” she had explained to me. “Especially they don’t want Philadelphia blacks coming out here and finding any land to hunt on. One year, when I still had legs under me, I walked around and tore Dwight’s signs down myself. No Hunting, except for him—it made me see red.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Dave,” Dwight’s distant voice said. “If I see any of those cats still around, I promise they won’t live to tell the tale. Hunting season is hard times on cats. Hunters see them as competition.”